Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  “Okay,” Jason said. “You got your tensioners where they need to be?”

  “Everything is perfect,” Chris said.

  In the accommodation block, the VIP meeting was finishing up with the presentation of the Horizon’s award for safe operation. When that was over, Horizon department heads went off to bed or to their tour assignments, leaving the four shoreside execs to debate what to do next.

  Buddy Trahan was an old hand on Transocean rigs, and there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen. But Daun thought Pat O’Bryan and David Sims, the BP contingent, might enjoy going up to the bridge to get a sense of the maritime side of things. On a lot of these tours, the VIPs didn’t bother to go up there. They toured the rig floor and the drilling machinery, because that’s what the rig was to them, a drilling machine.

  It struck Daun that they didn’t give enough credit “to the individuals who worked the marine systems and whatnot.”

  Curt had technically finished his shift at six, but the captain is never off duty in the same way as other department heads. He’s always on call in an emergency. And of course he had attended the VIP meeting, and now said he’d be happy to escort them. They all tromped up the stairs to the bridge, a large square enclosure directly beneath the helipad on the forward, port side of the rig. It had prominent windows, but especially at night, the view from inside was almost totally dominated by an impressive array of computer screens and instrument panels. Squint and you could imagine being on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

  Curt introduced them to the watch officers: Yancy Keplinger, the senior DPO, and his assistant, Andrea Fleytas. While Andrea kept her eye on business, Yancy gave a quick explanation of the various screens and control panels, the most impressive of which looked a little like an ICBM launch panel. That was appropriate enough, since pushing the right buttons could launch the rig’s version of the nuclear option—the emergency disconnect system, always referred to simply as EDS. It was a noun, but it was most often used as a verb, as in, “If we ever have to EDS…” The EDS was the last resort. The right combination of buttons would send hydraulic fluid charging down a line to the BOP, where it would activate the blind ram shears, the “pinchers” Jimmy had spoken of, driving them through the well shaft, slicing the drill pipe and sealing the well. This was a no-going-back option, as it would disconnect the upper half of the BOP stack from the lower half, and the rig would be freed to move away from the well, dragging five thousand feet of riser and half the BOP with it. Best case, recovering from an EDS would take days, maybe weeks. Worst case, they’d have to abandon the well. In any case, it wasn’t an option to exercise lightly.

  Yancy moved on to describe the principles of the dynamic positioning system, which kept the rig hovering above an absurdly small patch of ocean.

  The VIPs ended up clustered around the DPS simulator in the middle of the bridge. The simulator was essentially a very sophisticated computer game modeling all the forces involved in getting the rig to move, or making it stand still. The simulator had an actual justification for being there—in the many months of standing still in benign conditions, the DPS officers might want to stay in practice for a storm, or the moment when they’d need to move the rig to another well.

  The system also allowed them to practice for contingencies. With a few clicks of a mouse, the wind could be kicked up a few knots and a thruster sent out of service. It made a very cool—and challenging—game. They loaded the simulator with seventy-knot winds and thirty-foot seas, and just to make it more interesting, two thrusters down. Then they switched it to manual mode to see if any of them had the chops to maintain the rig on location.

  Pat O’Bryan gave it a shot for about half an hour, then they dumbed it down a little and let David Sims have a try. As they stumbled through the exercise, Yancy did his best to give them some instruction, but it wasn’t going well. They were wreaking all kinds of virtual havoc on the Horizon.

  When the VIP meeting ended, Randy Ezell went down to the galley to get something to drink, then down another deck to his office. He looked at his watch. It was 9:20, fifteen and a half hours after his shift had begun. But he didn’t feel his work was finished. He called up to the rig floor and got Jason on the phone.

  “Well, how did your negative test go?”

  “It went good,” Jason said. “We bled it off. We watched it for thirty minutes and we had no flow.”

  “What about your displacement? How’s it going?”

  “It’s going fine,” he said. “It won’t be much longer and we ought to have our spacer back.”

  “Do you need any help from me?”

  Jason repeated what he’d said a few hours earlier on the rig floor. “No, man. I’ve got this. Go to bed.”

  Randy was tired, for sure, and he would do just as Jason said. But he knew that if it hadn’t been for the VIP tour and the dinner meeting, he would still be down there with Jason. It was something he was likely to think about for the rest of his life.

  Dave Young had spent most of the day fussing with a dysfunctional thruster, the real-life version of what the VIPs were contending with on the DPS simulator. He’d worked his twelve hours, then attended the VIP meeting, and he wasn’t done yet. When the mud in the riser was done being displaced with seawater, they would insert the final cement plug, the top plug, which would finish off Macondo for good, as far as the Horizon was concerned.

  They could have set the top plug with the drilling mud still in the well, just after the negative test. The protective layer of the mud would have remained in place until the plug was poured and set, when the plug itself would have become a bulwark against a gas infiltration deep in the well. But BP had opted to remove the mud to the Bankston first. Dave would have to wait. One of his duties as chief mate was to be the custodian of cement and mud additives—essentially any heavy, noxious powder that was fluffed and pushed with air from tall steel silos in the columns of the rig. When the cement job started, he’d make sure the system had enough air pressure and all the valves were lined up in the right order to send to the cement unit the powder needed to mix up whatever brew was on the well plan.

  Dave tidied up some things in his office on the bridge, then decided to go up to the rig floor and see when they thought they’d be ready for the cement. He was hoping he’d have enough time before the job started to get a little rest. He passed the VIPs hooting it up around the simulator, walked out the starboard door, and climbed up to the rig floor looking for Jason and Dewey.

  The first thing he noticed was the pumps. They’d stopped.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “It’s going to be a little longer than we originally thought,” Jason said. “At least a couple hours. We’re having some issues with differential pressure we need to check out.”

  Dave had only a vague idea of what differential pressure issues entailed, but the “couple hours” part of it was plenty clear.

  “See you in a couple of hours then,” he said.

  He went back down to the bridge, put his radio in the desk, then headed down to get some rest. On the way to his cabin he stopped in the subsea office. It was just after 9:30.

  Chris Pleasant was in there, filing some documents on his computer.

  “The cement job’s going to be a couple of hours yet,” Dave said. “They’ve got some issues with the well.”

  Allen Seraile, an assistant driller, was in the office with Chris flipping through channels on the TV. Just then the clicker froze in his hand, and he cocked his head, listening. Now Dave heard it, too, the splattering of a sudden downpour on a metal roof. Allen said, “Chris, what’s that water?”

  Mike Williams was talking with his wife on the phone in his electronic technician’s shop when something came on the PA speakers in his office. He wasn’t listening, but his wife was. In the background, she heard a natural gas level being announced from Sperry-Sun, the gas monitoring contractors. She asked if he needed to get off the phone to go take care of it.

  “N
ah,” he said. “It’s just an indication to make everyone aware of what the gas levels are. We’ve gotten them so frequently on this well I’ve become immune. I don’t even hear them anymore.”

  The levels were read off as a number. When the number read 200—parts per million—it was the cutoff for all chipping, welding, grinding. That was when Mike started paying attention, when he knew to stop cutting wiring, doing anything that might make a spark. When that happened he felt more irritation at being delayed than concern about a threat to his safety.

  Then he heard a hissing noise and a thump. His first thought was that for some reason they were running the riser skate, which carried riser sections onto the rig floor. The skate ran up right behind his office, and the operators were always slamming it against the mechanical stops in the back, hard enough to shake his office. That could account for the thump, and he assumed the hiss was from the hydraulic leak inevitably caused by banging the skate around like a toy.

  “Hey,” he said. “I need to go check this out and see what’s going on. Make sure we don’t have hydraulic oil going everywhere.”

  He hung up, and almost immediately he heard something beeping through his ventilation system. The vents crossed over between his shop and the ECR—the engine control room—next door. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It was continuous, and he knew that it must be the local alarms on the ECR’s panel, but he had no idea what kind of alarms. They kept coming, one on top of the other. Now he knew there was nothing routine about this. His heart pumped a rush of blood to his head. What was going on? He was still trying to rationalize it. Did he have a process station acting up? Were these false alarms?

  His mind was whirling, trying to put all the pieces together, the thump, the hissing, the beeps. The only conclusion he arrived at was that he needed to get up from his desk and go find out exactly what the hell was happening.

  Jason could feel the well boiling now. All thoughts of differential pressures or any other fancy explanations blew away. The gas was coming. It was that simple. It had entered the well and moved up the column. As it rose, the pressure decreased until the liquefied gas became gaseous. At that moment, it began to expand, rapidly, exponentially, pushing everything before it through miles of mud and seawater. Now it was almost there. As he lunged past the assistant driller for the BOP panel he shouted, “Call Randy!”

  Randy Ezell had just switched off his overhead light and was beginning to doze with the TV on when the phone rang. He hit his alarm clock light and it said 9:50. He grabbed the phone. It was Steve Curtis, the assistant driller.

  “We have a situation,” Steve said, his voice strange and tight. “The well is blown out. We have mud going to the crown.”

  Randy felt the terrible truth of a cliché he’d heard all his life. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When he tried to speak, he found himself sputtering. “Do y’all have it shut in?” he asked.

  “Jason is shutting it in now,” Curtis said, and his voice cracked a little. “Randy,” he said, “we need your help.”

  Randy was already out of bed grabbing some pants and trying to stuff his feet in his boots. “Steve,” he said. “I’ll be—I’ll be right there.”

  Alwin Landry, master of the Damon Bankston, was in the bridge of his workboat finishing up some log entries when his DPO said, “There’s mud or something coming out from under the rig.”

  Landry’s first thought was that a hose had busted. Then he looked out the starboard window and saw dark liquid shooting through the top of the derrick. It wasn’t a spray, it was an explosion. The mud spattered down on his deck, along with some dead birds, knocked out of the sky by the force of the raging geyser of mud. He got the Horizon bridge on the radio. “We’re having a well control problem,” a tense voice told him. Then another voice came on telling him to go to his five-hundred-meter standby position.

  Landry had a problem, too, now. The Bankston was just forty feet away from the edge of the rig, and he still had the hose on board taking in mud. The hose was so big and heavy it took a crane to lift it. He was going through options in his head when he looked back at the rig and saw a flash.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT”

  2145 Hours, April 20, 2010

  Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

  Down in the engine control room, about the time that Mike Williams put a call through to his wife, Chief Mechanic Doug Brown was seeing to some end-of-shift paperwork. The control room was a steel box with two windows and doors on either side leading to the huge 10,000-horsepower engines, and from there Doug kept an eye on the computer panels that monitored engine temperature, pressure, and rpm’s. With him were his boss, First Assistant Engineer Brent Mansfield, and two motormen, Terry Sellers and Willie Stoner, rank-and-file guys who handled the minutiae of keeping the engines roaring, as they were now. The two diesels on either side of the control room, Number 3 and Number 6, were on line and humming through the inch-thick steel fire doors that separated the engines and the control room.

  They all heard the hiss. Doug thought it sounded like a large air hose springing a leak.

  The four men looked up, around the room, then at each other. From their expressions it was clear that none of them could identify what the sound was or where it was coming from. Gas alarms began to beep. They half expected to hear an announcement from the bridge over the PA system, but there was nothing. Just beeping and hissing. Finally the radio crackled to life. It was Captain Curt telling the supply boat Damon Bankston to detach and move away from the rig.

  That broke the spell. Stoner walked over to the radio and turned it up. The hiss had become a roar, like a jet engine. Just as he turned to go back to his chair, engine Number 3, the engine on the port side, began to rev.

  Doug said, “Something ain’t right.”

  He turned to the console to study the screen. At the very bottom of the panel, multiple emergency shutdown (ESD) alerts began to flash. Now Doug understood how much danger they were in. The ESDs flashed when multiple gas sensors were triggered in a given area. They were designed to automatically shut all air vents to stop the spread of the gas, which was colorless and odorless, so it could be difficult to know if the dampeners worked. Except…

  Engine Number 3 revved higher. Methane is also a powerful and explosive fuel. If it had gotten into the engine room…

  Doug began to run through the awful chain reaction in his mind. Engine 3 was screaming now. Why didn’t it shut down? Two automatic engine trips designed to shut down the engines when they went into overspeed should have kicked in by now. He knew they worked because he tested them periodically, forcing the engines into overspeed just to watch them shut down. But the Number 3 wouldn’t quit. It kept revving faster and faster, moving through the octaves to the highest pitch Doug had ever heard, then kept going until it was so high he couldn’t hear it anymore. He felt he was about to reach some inevitable conclusion when the power surge tripped a breaker and the lights and computers blinked out.

  “We’re dark,” Doug said. Then there was a deafening bang and the heavy steel door to the port engine room blew off its hinges. The door tilted at an odd angle. For an infinitesimal moment, moonlight streamed benignly through the door’s porthole. Then everything shifted. The door tore through the control room, slamming Brent Mansfield into the corner, fracturing his skull and tearing away a ten-inch-long slice of scalp. Doug was blasted with the unyielding impact of a freight train. The floor opened beneath him and he dropped into a hole. He was aware that he was in the sub-floor, in a tangle of cables and wires. He wondered what was happening. He was confused. He felt pain. Now he heard the Number 6 engine screaming on the starboard side. As he tried to stand, a second explosion slammed him violently back down the hole, and the collapsing ceiling followed him in. He lay there covered in trash and tiles, listening to screams and cries for help, smelling smoke but seeing no fire, wondering when the next explosion would come.

  As Mi
ke Williams pushed back from his desk, still thinking about his wife, the computer monitor blew up in his face. All the lights in his shop exploded and fine shards of glass fell like sparkling rain. Now he knew they were in trouble. He reached down to grab open the door. Just as his hand touched the handle, the engine on the other side of his wall revved to a level he could have never imagined possible, spinning so fast it just…stopped. The awful hissing noise turned to a whoosh and a bang. The door broke its six stainless steel hinges and slammed against his forehead, pushing him clear across the shop. When he came to, he was up against a wall, the door on top of him. His first clear thought was, This is it. I am going to die right here, right now.

  He didn’t die. Within seconds, the room filled with smoke. Mike couldn’t see and he couldn’t breathe. He managed to push the door off him and crawled across the floor to the opening where the door had been. He reached in his pocket and found a pen flashlight. It worked. He put it in his mouth but still couldn’t see anything. Why couldn’t he see?

  He knew he was in the passageway between his shop and the forward door to the engine control room. He made his way by feel, staying on his hands and knees because he figured if there were any oxygen, it would be at floor level. As he reached the next door, he reached for the handle. It exploded.

  Williams flew back thirty-five feet into another wall. His arm didn’t seem to be working, and neither did his left leg. He still couldn’t breathe or see. The CO2 from the fire extinguishers was overwhelming him. He knew he needed to get out, to find some air. He crawled back down the hallway and into the engine control room. In his blind progress, he felt himself bumping into a body. He couldn’t tell who it was, and there was no movement. He decided that whoever it was was dead, and even if not, he was in no condition to help. He could barely help himself.